Jazz
To bebop or not to bebop
Martin Gayford
When bebop, the fiery jazz insurrec- tion of the 1940s, first broke upon the world, many even of the hip were pole- axed with horror and dismay. 'America has gone mad!' the British pianist George Shearing reported back from New York after the war. Cab Calloway, the band leader and singer, called bop 'Chinese music' (and didn't want anyone playing it in his band). It was its harmonic quality that made it sound bizarre or Chinese — a new procedure of improvising on extended chords related to those of the original theme. This, along with a tendency to loosen the regular rhythmic flow with unexpected accents and sprinting runs, was the trade mark of bop, and those used to other ways often did not like it. 'What they're playing ain't jazz,' opined Louis Armstrong. For a while feelings ran high.
With great rapidity, however, which will come as no surprise to the student of revolutions, bebop became the new ortho- doxy. It was assimilated . not only by younger musicians, but also to a surprising extent by the older generation. And natur- ally, no sooner had bebop become the norm than the harmonic enrichment and rhythmic complexity that at first seemed so liberating became the reverse. Much effort in the late Fifties and Sixties was devoted to escaping from the 'prison of chords' that bop had become — hence the nirvana of modal improvisation and the screaming freak-out of free jazz.
Equally naturally, in the last decade a new young generation, rebelling in turn against the free-jazzers and not seeing any way forward from a position of absolute harmonic and rhythmic laissez-faire, have turned backwards — often towards bop. And predictably the grizzled veterans of the Sixties and Seventies have shaken their heads over the young who spurn their experiments of yesteryear. Plus get change.
All this has made it very difficult to listen to the original bebop records with an 'Looks like the denture fairy again.' innocent ear. To sensibilities seasoned to accommodate, say, the deafening rock/free jazz guitar of James 'Blood' Ulmer, the daring chords of 1945 sound about as shocking as Monteverdi. Nonetheless, it is still possible to catch something of the fizzy excitement of those days, and the sense of the imagination suddenly set free.
Bebop was, in the first place, the inven- tion of a small coterie led by the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Gillespie is still with us (he appears with his United Nation big band at
the Barbican on 28 October). These days, his cracklingly vivacious style is anything but disconcerting, though it continues to excite (some of the best early Gillespie can be found on The Bebop Revolution, a new compilation issued by RCA Bluebird).
Parker, on the other hand, who died in 1955 of dissipation that can only be de- scribed as Herculean, remains demanding listening — far more so than many of his successors. It is no longer that the notes he played sound odd, but that he packed such an alarming quantity of ideas into every chorus, and — often — at such bewildering speed. The music of Louis Armstrong moves at the measured pace of great oratory; Parker's whizzes along at the quicksilver speed of thought.
One musician who has take up the challenge of Parker's music with conspi- cuous success is another alto saxophonist named Charles — Charles McPherson, who is appearing in London next week at the Pizza Express, Dean Street, then at the Guinness Jazz Festival, Cork. Now 51, McPherson belongs to a generation in- termediate between the original boppers and today's young retro-jazzers. He was consequently just old enough to hear Par- ker in person: 'I saw him just once. I was about 15, and it was at a dance in Detroit. Even at that early age, I was aware that this was a different sort of person. He was a hero to me.'
McPherson has a very different lifestyle from Parker's. In the manner of the new-style unbohemian jazz musician, his indulgences include jogging and computer chess. But his commitment to improvising with the greatest possible creativity is the same as Parker's, as is the whirlwind energy of his music. Since he appeared on the New York jazz scene in the late 1950s, McPherson has steadily improved, but has continued to play in more or less the same way. Meanwhile, his favoured idiom has gone from being fairly up-to-date to being vieux jeu, and back to being the latest thing again. Not surprisingly, he is jaundiced on the subject of fashion: 'As to what is modern and what isn't, I think a lot of that is just slogans and catchphrases. What is modern in one decade will be old-time in the next. Basically, it's music.' Which strikes me as a very sensible approach.
has been Hilary Mantel will resume her cinema col- umn next week.
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